


The Night's First Watch

by fathomfive



Category: Doctor Strange (2016)
Genre: Aftermath, Friendship, Gen, IKEA, Post-Canon, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 04:04:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17759438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fathomfive/pseuds/fathomfive
Summary: Stephen settles in at the New York Sanctum, and deals with the laundry list of tasks that come with any new job.  First on the list: interior decor, a dead man's leftovers, and coming to grips with a long, long history of sacrifice.Too bad Daniel Drumm didn't leave a helpful memo about what, exactly, it means to dedicate your life to standing guard between the world and chaos.





	The Night's First Watch

Stephen Strange stood in the checkout line of the Long Island IKEA, pondering the glowing café sign. People were looking at him funny, and he wasn’t sure if it was because of the mystical robes or because he had the thousand-yard stare of someone who had recently peered into horrific realities they knew not of. The Swedish meatball dinner was discounted this weekend only. It had been two days since he’d last died.

Since then, he’d found his life turned upside down even more thoroughly than before. That ought to mean that it was now right side up, but he was wearing sentient drapery, couldn’t remember the last time he’d showered, and was currently attempting to purchase something called a VIPPARP. That, and he had just become the newest Master of New York’s Sanctum Sanctorum. Right side up was starting to seem like a distant concept.

The line moved up a little. The Cloak of Levitation gave him a shove, subtle enough to look like the work of a breeze except for the fact that they were indoors. He shuffled forward. 

He’d been in three time zones in the last ten hours. First Hong Kong, helping to clean up residual time magic, then Kamar-Taj, where he’d taken his oath as Master of the Sanctum. And now New York. He’d stepped into the entry hall of his new home, and felt the weight of everything he’d given up to get here hanging over his head like a cartoon anvil. The last person to hold this job had died about three feet from where he was standing.

Instead of thinking about that and doing something gauche like having a screaming fit, he zeroed in on the ugliest thing in the room. It was a stuffed deer head mounted on the landing, and despite not having a body it seemed quite alive. It was chewing a nonexistent cud and watching him with interest.

“Mind your own business,” he told it.

The deer licked its left nostril and kept watching him with canny eyes.

It came to Stephen that nothing except maybe extreme sleep deprivation could stop him from doing what he wanted right then. He checked that the usual stealth spell was still attached to his sling ring, and then he opened a portal to IKEA. He was going to replace that deer with a reasonably priced sconce.

Now, he waited while a young couple struggled to lift an enormous flat-pack something-or-other over the checkout turnstile. A child shrieked from the designated children’s play area. He resisted the urge to tell the nearest staff member that he had sacrificed everything in battle against unseen powers of vast malevolence and would they please just open another register so he could pay for his stuff and go.

Anyway, it was hard to say he had sacrificed everything when he was standing right here, pretty much alive. He was having some trouble getting his head around that. He was standing right here, because he hadn’t died, and he was going to have to deal with the consequences of that. It was like a record scratch in his brain – _wait, really? Are we sure? So what now?_

_No, seriously._

_What do I do now?_

He checked out. He took his reasonably priced VIPPARP back to the Sanctum and left it, still boxed, at the foot of the entry stairs. He waited for an answer, but none was forthcoming. It was three in the afternoon.

Master Hamir had administered the oath of Mastery, sketched in hovering lines of golden fire. There hadn’t been much of an audience, since a quite a few Masters of the Mystic Arts were dead and the rest just really didn’t like him. After Stephen was done repeating the words, the attendees were quiet. They looked like people who were using both hands to cover a leak in the side of the boat, and were painfully aware that they had no hands left to bail. _This better work,_ their expressions said. _We’re not sure where it goes from here._

Shortly before that Stephen had found his way into the kitchens and drunk probably too much of that wake-up tea that made your hair stand up and your teeth vibrate. As he stood there with his heart beating too fast and sweat breaking out on his forehead, seeing the somber looks on the faces of the sorcerers around him, some small fearful part of him wondered if this was a mistake.

But there was a larger part of him that only feared one thing—and that was failure, not death. It said, _Just watch me._

The deer head turned to watch him as he climbed the stairs. He flicked it off, ignored its affronted snort, and went to go find the kitchen.

It took him forty minutes. The Sanctum was an unstable piece of spatial origami disguised as a building, which he’d noticed on his last visit but not taken the time to appreciate because so many different people had been trying to kill him. It took some trial and error with the space-folding sorceries contained within the walls, but eventually he located a kitchenette with a table to slump at. He opened the fridge and saw three beers, a Tupperware of jollof rice, and part of a rotisserie chicken.

His brain offered him the image of Daniel Drumm bent at an unnatural angle on the tiles of the entry hall—eyes wide, already gone. He squeezed his eyes shut through the wave of vertigo. Then he took the plastic box and shut the fridge.

He was sitting at the table eating cold rice and waiting for the coffee maker to start up when the locator on his sling ring pulsed. Once, twice, and a portal opened in the middle of the kitchen. Wong stepped through, followed by more acolytes than Stephen wanted to see while eating a dead man’s leftovers or really ever. 

“Close that thing,” he said. “You’re letting in a draft.” The Cloak bunched protectively around him.

Wong eyed him, too keen for comfort. “Don’t tell me you forgot,” he said. He stood aside to make way for the acolytes spilling into the kitchen. 

Stephen ate another forkful of rice and tried not to let on how spicy it was. He was sweating again. “I don’t forget things,” he said. “I was hoping you’d forget.” He had been looking forward to doing some more nothing, but it looked like he was going to be otherwise occupied. It was moving day. “You could have warned me that moving day meant, you know, daytime _in Nepal._ ” 

Wong shrugged. “Figured you were used to weird hours,” he said. The coffee maker gurgled and began to drip. They looked at one another in silence for a moment. Stephen did not have illusions about his own charisma, and he knew that the number of friends he’d made at Kamar-Taj was approximately zero. But if he could round up to a modest fraction, like point three seven, it would be because of Wong.

A cool breeze gusted in through the portal, sending dry leaves scattering across the kitchen floor. The last few acolytes pushed their way in, and Stephen backed up against the counter to make room. He took his rice with him. When they were all done making cramped bows and saying “Master” and elbowing things off the counter, he shot a Wong a desperate glance. Wong had filled Stephen’s mug and was drinking from it.

“Do we really need this much help?” Stephen said. “I’ve already brought most of my things over.”

“Since security here was compromised, Hamir wants some of the relics moved to Kamar-Taj,” Wong said. “And we’ll be taking Daniel’s things.” He glanced at his coffee and his gaze stuck there as if weighted down. When he looked up, their eyes met for a moment and Stephen saw that Wong looked as tired as he felt. He wondered if point three seven percent friendship meant he had to ask if Wong was okay.

By silent mutual agreement, they looked away at opposite corners of the kitchen. Stephen chased a couple grains of rice around the bottom of the plastic box.

“Well, it’s your circus,” he said. “Have at it. I’ll join you when I’m cleaned up.”

Twenty minutes later, the air was full of flying furniture. Under Wong’s direction, the acolytes were working together to levitate a steady stream of trunks, books, boxes, and display cases down the central hall and through a portal at the top of the staircase. Someone had taken the deer head off the wall, and found out the hard way that when you did that it started screaming. Wong had let it go on for about three seconds, before snapping a quick gesture that enveloped the head in a bubble of silence. The mouth kept moving.

“I don’t want that back,” Stephen said. The Cloak waved a corner of its hem at the deer as it floated away.

The stream of stuff floating past his head gave him a weird pang of familiarity. Not the good kind. It looked – it looked like Hong Kong, as it rewound in time, shattered glass spooling back into window frames, debris fitting itself back together, the horrified expressions fading from the faces of onlookers. 

Wong’s body lifting off a piece of rebar, the fabric of his tunic knitting itself back together over a rapidly closing wound. He wondered if Wong remembered that.

That was a bad thing to try to bond over. Stephen was not going to bring it up. He wasn’t. Even though it was practically the biggest thing they had in common, the dying and then coming back, and there was no one else who know what it felt like to be holding that particular get-out-of-jail-free card. He was aware on a clinical level that it was important to share things with people if you want to get closer to them. But there was knowing, and then there was actually trying to upgrade Wong from point three seven percent of a friend. 

Because that’s what he had been trying to do all this time, needling him, showing off: trying to make friends. Or at least awe him. He tended to get the two mixed up.

In Hong Kong, after Mordo had made his dramatic exit, Stephen had sat down hard on the curb next to the noodle cart and said, “I don’t want Daniel’s bed.”

“What?” Wong had said, leaning down and then gently collapsing the rest of the way. They sat side by side with their feet in the gutter. “What are you talking about?”

Stephen’s head swam. The noodle vendor shouted something cheerfully profane at the stinky tofu cart across the street. “I can’t use his bed,” he said. “I want a different bed.” He slumped over, and Wong put a hand to his back.

From five inches away and sideways Wong’s expression was harder to read than unusual. Awe, shock, the shadow of some confused grief that time magic could not fully erase. The Eye of Agamotto dragged at Stephen’s neck like an albatross.

“There are plenty of beds at the New York Sanctum,” Wong said. Stephen thought, for some reason, that he was being comforted. Probably the massive shock. “You can have any one you want.”

“Not Daniel’s,” Stephen had muttered. “That’d be weird.” Wong kept holding him up.

Now the deer head floated through the portal, on its way to become Hamir’s problem. It was followed by a glass bottle full of writhing shadows, a sword wrapped in spell-inscribed cloth, and several back issues of _Better Homes and Gardens._ Stephen snagged a stray page from the file box that bobbed by in their wake.

It was covered in the slanted, spiky hand of someone who wrote fast and thought even faster. He skimmed the first few paragraphs and felt the lights go on in his brain: he’d have to read for a week to really grasp the theory, but what he could make out fascinated him. He flipped the page and read faster.

“Some of my teacher’s more recent work,” said a woman at his elbow. He looked up and met the grave dark gaze of one of the acolytes. She had a tassel on her robe that indicated she was about to take a level in proficiency. 

“Naomi,” she said. “I was studying under Master Daniel until – well.”

“Uh, hi,” he said. “My condolences.” He cast around for something else to say. He’d said consoling things to people before, but in the same way you said “it’s going” when someone asked you how it was going. The conversation usually failed to progress after that.

“Master Strange,” Naomi said.

“I didn’t know him, but I’m sure I was missing out,” he said. 

“You were,” Naomi said. “Master Strange, would you—”

“He didn’t decorate this place, did he?” Stephen said. Something hit him in the ear. He turned his head and saw a grinning ceramic cat floating several inches from his face. It was weeping from both smudged eyes. Behind it, a whole stream of occult odds and ends had halted. One of the acolytes made a shooing motion at him.

“You’re a little in the way,” Naomi said.

“Right. Yeah,” Stephen said. “Right.” He stepped out of the way, and the cursed flea market resumed its slow progress up the stairs. 

“What is this?” he said, shoving the paper at Naomi. “It sounds like he was working on one hell of a high level.”

“New sorceries,” Naomi said. “Or they were going to be. He was developing a spell to replicate some of the properties of the Mirror Dimension on a smaller scale.”

“Pocket dimensions,” Stephen said. “You’d have to nest them in existing planar structures – ”

“Yes,” Naomi said. “He liked that kind of work. Delicate, precise.” She paused, and her mouth quirked up in a bitter little smile. “It didn’t do much for him in the end.”

When she held out her hand for the page he hesitated, trying to commit as much of it to memory as he could. Then he pushed it toward her, trying to ignore the way it magnified the tremors in his hands. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.” When she stepped away he forced himself not to watch.

Wong was standing just inside the relic hall. He had been watching them, Stephen could tell. He was also holding an honest-to-god Rolodex, which meant that they were getting to the bottom of the barrel in terms of magical artifacts. Stephen nodded at him in what he thought was an assured and casual way. Wong pressed his lips together in what he probably thought was a smile.

Stephen was starting to think nothing could actually impress Wong except the discography of Beyoncé and by extension selections from the best years of Destiny’s Child. It was a discouraging thought. He went over. 

“Tell me that’s haunted,” Stephen said. “It would really cheer me up right now.”

“What?” Wong said. “I—yeah. Sure. I’ll let you know if it curses me.” He hesitated, riffling the cards back and forth. The Rolodex continued to look disappointingly mundane. “You talked to Naomi,” he said.

“She seems nice,” Stephen lied. Niceness was not, in fact, one of the things he noticed about people. 

“She’s taking it hard,” Wong said. He ran his thumb over the cards, _fwip-fwip-fwip._ He was looking over Stephen’s shoulder. “Daniel was a good teacher.”

Stephen knew better than to try to say consoling things to him. He kept his mouth shut. Wong snapped the Rolodex cover down and let out a long breath.

“We’re almost done here,” he said. “You have plans tonight?”

“Why?” Stephen said. Wong just looked at him.

“Oh,” Stephen said. “Yeah. No. I don’t have plans.”

“Good,” Wong said. “Because I’m going to show you where your bar is. Say thank you.”

“Thank you,” Stephen said.

The sun was going. Old gold light had come down over the rooftops, turning the Village into a picture from another time. When the last acolyte vanished through the portal, carrying the possibly-but-probably-not-enchanted Rolodex, Wong drew the circle shut.

They stood there in the empty hall, in the new silence.

“You mentioned a bar,” Stephen said.

“So I did,” Wong said. “Come on.”

He led Stephen down the stairs. At the bottom, with their backs to the front door, he pointed to the wooden scrollwork above the entrance to the relic hall. “You’re sworn in, it’ll respond to you now,” he said. 

Stephen studied the spell that was carved there: an elegant string; phrase and argument, balance and actuation. He traced its shape with hands that only ached a little bit. And at the head of the stairs, another staircase began to unfold out of the empty space, spooling up out of nothingness towards the vaulted ceiling. A door swung open at the top.

“The next thing you need to show me is the owner’s manual for this place,” Stephen said, and started climbing.

The door opened onto a long windowed hall whose shape had very little to do with the physical reality of the building. Stephen walked close by the windows to look out, and slowed when he saw the view.

“You okay? I’m waiting for the smartass comment,” Wong said.

Stephen kept staring. After a little while he said, “Don’t rush me.” 

It was night beyond the windows, but somewhere else—night above a sea of fog, window after window of starless blue-black haze. A mountainside dropped sheer away below them, covered in softly moving grass.

The hall was lined with doors. Some had light showing from beneath, others were dark. A harp played from behind one of them. He and Wong walked on, their steps muffled by the thick carpet.

“So,” Stephen said, when he couldn’t stand the silence. “Is there a list of which doors I’m not supposed to open, or what?”

“I knew you had a comment,” Wong grunted. They kept walking. “You’re the Master,” he said after a while. “Open any door you like, as long as you take responsibility for what’s behind it.”

Stephen took the hint and shut up until they reached the end of the hall.

The door there was plain, but the shimmer of sorcery had sunk into the wood, just on the edge of seeing. Stephen gripped its handle and felt the hum of idling power, something complex and aware. He was beginning to suspect that there was no owner’s manual. He opened the door.

“Your study,” Wong said. And then, “It’s a while since I was in here. I forgot he was this bad.”

Daniel Drumm appeared to have managed his files by the painstaking method of putting them down on the nearest surface and leaving them there. There were books on the floor and Starbucks cups on the bookshelves, potted plants used as paperweights, and a side table whose odd leg was propped up by a stack of paper covered in arcane sigils. Stephen was struck again by the sight of a stranger’s life spread wall to wall, as though the inhabitant would be back any minute. He picked up one of the cups: iced Americano, two shots of vanilla.

“This room responds to the way you use it,” Wong said. “Gets bigger or smaller, grows new cabinets, that kind of thing. Just give it some time to get accustomed to you.”

“Does it vacuum itself?” Stephen asked.

“It does not,” Wong said.

He seemed about to say something else, but instead he went to the bar, picked up one of the stacks of paper, realized there wasn’t anywhere to put it that wasn’t covered with other stacks of paper, and put it on the floor. Stephen busied himself clearing off the visitor chairs and the coffee table, and once they weren’t looking at each other he made himself ask what he wanted to know.

“You and Daniel. You were friends?”

A pause. 

“Not as much as we should have been,” Wong said. “Funny how you realize that once a guy gets impaled.” He thumped a stack of books onto the desk chair.

“Still,” Stephen said. “I’m sorry.” He hadn’t tapped any of the space-folding spells that lay dormant in the walls, but all of a sudden the room felt too small.

“Yeah,” Wong said. 

“It’s not that I’ve never seen people die,” Stephen said, when the silence got to be too much for him. “Only it was different. All this is different. The last time I was promoted they gave me a plaque—a small one, you know. Tasteful.”

“You want a plaque?” Wong grunted.

“I don’t want a plaque,” Stephen said, with feeling. He took a box of books off the table and shoved it into the corner with his foot. “Jesus. My head was so far up my ass back then.”

“Ah, back then,” Wong said, in tones of gentle nostalgia.

Stephen turned to glare at him, and Wong raised his eyebrows in that way that said _you know I’m right._ And then they were looking at each other, and they were out of convenient distractions.

“The people I saw die, I didn’t live in their damn houses,” Stephen said. “I didn’t use their offices. They went to the morgue and their families went home and did whatever families do and _I_ went home, where I had—my fucking plaque in my office. That’s what I’m saying.”

What he wasn’t saying was that it was—a lot, maybe too much. This house, folded in endlessly upon itself and crammed with history. Years and doors, books and secrets, all the things left behind by people who had seen what was coming for the world and still thought they could stand against it. 

“You think I don’t get it?” Wong said. “I was someone else once too. I get it. Either there is no continuity or continuity is all we have.” He slid the bar door open and bent to peer inside. “Some days one’s as bad as the other.”

He rummaged around inside the bar, gave a snort of disgust, and did something that made spell-light flare briefly inside. Stephen leaned over to see that the door now opened onto a different bar entirely, one with a lot more bottles. Wong took out two tiny glasses and a bottle of clear liquor.

“Sit,” he said. Stephen sat.

Wong took his time opening the bottle and pouring them each a glass. He sniffed at his own, wrinkled his nose, and said, “There’s a book at Kamar-Taj. Every Sanctum Master has an entry—their philosophies, their work. You can borrow it. This time only, no late fees.”

“You’re never charged me late fees,” Stephen said.

“I just haven’t collected yet,” Wong said. He slid a glass across the table to Stephen and sat there looking at it. Stephen watched him clear his throat, rub his index finger across his upper lip.

“Wait,” Stephen said. “Is this the shovel talk? For the universe? Is there even a script for that?”

“Sometimes I really don’t like you,” Wong said. He was smiling a little, in a pinched sort of way.

“Come on, let’s hear it,” Stephen said. “Promise I won’t laugh.”

“You probably won’t listen to anything I do say,” Wong said.

“Probably not,” Stephen said. Wong’s smile came out the rest of the way, fleeting and not particularly happy. He raised his glass and drained it.  
Stephen followed suit. When he’d emptied the glass he stared down at it in a mixture of admiration and disgust.

“Kaoliang. Acquired taste,” Wong said.

“Where do you acquire it? The embalming table?” Stephen said. Wong gestured for his glass. Stephen held it out and let Wong pour him another.

“You swore an oath,” Wong said.

“Yeah, I did,” Stephen said. “Not the first time.” What he didn’t think he could say yet was that he’d fucked that first one pretty soundly. But the words came back to him sometimes: _Above all I must not play at God._

“So let me make this simple for you,” Wong said. He gestured around them at the fine paneled walls, the high ceiling, the layered tracery of spells laid down by generations of sorcerers who had all (whether grandly or quietly) died for the same thing they lived for. “You are in the driver’s seat now. Do not get out of the car.”

Stephen emptied his glass again. His throat burned. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, simple. No problem. I’ll drink to that.” 

Wong refilled the glasses. They drank their jet fuel. Outside, the night-that-was-elsewhere draped itself down over mountains Stephen didn’t know the name of. The main thing was that it was somewhere without car alarms going off every five minutes.

“Thanks,” he said, because he meant it and at the moment that seemed more important than his pride. Also because kaoliang was _strong._ “This’d be worse if I were by myself.”

Wong eyed him for a long moment. “You’re still not having a good time, is what I’m hearing,” he said. “Anyway, that’s not how this works. You don’t let a friend stand the first watch alone.”

Stephen grabbed the bottle and poured himself another drink, painstaking, pressing the bottleneck to the rim of his glass. Hot threads of pain shot through his fingers. He concentrated on not spilling.

Wong held his own glass out and waited, like there was all the time in the world. Maybe there was. It was a long night, mostly metaphorically speaking: a long series of watches with no end, a life of standing guard.

“A friend, huh?” Stephen said finally. “You’re going to regret saying that.”

“I know,” Wong said. 

“I don’t mean eventually,” Stephen said. “Probably in like twenty minutes. When we’re good and drunk I need your help installing a lamp.”

Wong’s brow knitted.

“Say yes,” Stephen said.

“All right,” Wong said.

“That’s the spirit,” Stephen said. They raised their glasses again and drank, and the kaoliang tasted exactly as bad as it did the first time. Outside the darkened window the night stretched on in all directions.

**Author's Note:**

> I did NOT expect to like Stephen Strange as much as I do, but he saved reality by harnessing the power of being a colossally annoying prick. poetic cinema.
> 
> the "don't get out of the car" metaphor is borrowed, with all respect, from Diane Duane's _Young Wizards_ series.


End file.
